Nuclear crossroads

Workers at Hanford's Cold Test Facility use this 1
million-gallon single-shelled storage tank to test equipment that
will be used to clean up Hanford's buried waste tanks. PAUL JOSEPH
BROWN/SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Updated May 1, 2008

In
Washington state, a 1-million-gallon plume of radioactive waste is
seeping from Hanford Nuclear Reserve toward the Columbia River. But
in Washington, D.C., Dennis Spurgeon foresees a rosy future for the
Department of Energy's nuclear program.

Last November,
Spurgeon, assistant secretary for nuclear energy, assured the
congressional Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the
program will "promote a significant, wide-scale use of nuclear
energy in a safe and secure manner ... while decreasing the risk of
nuclear weapons proliferation and effectively addressing the
challenge of nuclear waste disposal."

It's been three
decades since a nuclear power plant has been built in the United
States. Now, under the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the Energy
Department is working hard to lure new proposals, adding billions
in tax breaks and "cost overrun guarantees" and streamlining its
licensing process with four ready-to-use designs, early site
permits and a combined construction permit and operating license.
The 104 nuclear power plants currently in the U.S. generate about
20 percent of the nation's electricity. Some Energy Department
plans call for as many as 50 new nuclear plants by 2020, producing
50,000 megawatts. Twenty-two applications are currently on file
with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, including proposals for
plants in Utah and Idaho. Nuclear weapon development is ramping up
as well, with a budget next year of $6.6 billion.

At $25
billion, the 2009 DOE's budget request is $5 billion more than
2008. Meanwhile, the cleanup budget has plummeted for the fifth
year in a row, dropping $1 billion in just the past three years,
according to Jane Hedges, Washington state's nuclear waste program
manager. "We thought that was telling," she says.

The
cuts have left many Western sites, including Hanford and the Idaho
National Laboratory, facing setbacks in the dangerous and
complicated mop-up of this country's nuclear messes. Washington
state has even threatened to sue the DOE for failing to meet the
terms of the Hanford cleanup agreement.

Now
considered the most contaminated site in the nation,
Hanford - established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project -
produced plutonium for nuclear weapons for more than 40 years. The
586-square-mile property in southeastern Washington once hosted
nine nuclear reactors, five chemical separation plants and hundreds
of support facilities. By 1987, all of the reactors were closed
except the Columbia Generating Station, the only commercial nuclear
power plant in the Northwest.

The site has more than 170
massive underground steel tanks filled with acids, solvents and
heavy metals, including the radioactive elements plutonium, cesium,
strontium and uranium. Some 140 of the tanks are single-walled, 40
to 60 years old and "unfit for use." The original agreement called
for the tanks to be cleaned out within several decades, says
Hedges. But at current funding levels, with an $8 billion cleanup
budget shortfall over 10 years, it will take more than a century to
empty them.

On top of the 53 million gallons of tank
waste, untold amounts of radioactive and hazardous waste languish
in unlined landfills, along with 450 billion gallons of liquid
waste in ponds, ditches and drain fields. The site has already
contaminated 200 square miles of groundwater.

A
state away and two decades ago, a transfer line from a
tank at the Idaho National Laboratory leaked radioactive waste
generated from nuclear weapons production into the groundwater.
Chromium, tritium and other contaminants have been detected in the
Snake River Plain aquifer, sole drinking water source for more than
300,000 residents of eastern Idaho.

Rep. Mike Simpson,
R-Idaho, fears budget shortfalls will only make things worse,
leading to spills of PCBs, uranium, plutonium and hazardous
chemicals, and preventing necessary equipment maintenance. Simpson,
with about two dozen House colleagues, is part of the Nuclear
Cleanup Caucus initiated by Doc Hastings, R-Wash., in the
mid-1990s. The bipartisan group and its Senate counterpart are
currently stumping for more cleanup money.

Meanwhile,
permit changes at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico
have postponed shipments from Idaho and added to costs. And one
long-planned "solution" to the problem, the proposed Yucca Mountain
repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is beset with legal,
logistic and budgetary challenges. It will not open for at least
another decade, if ever.

But nuclear
advocates, including some prominent enviros, believe the
waste issue is solvable. "It is incorrect to call it waste," writes
former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore, now a nuclear industry
spokesman, "because 95 percent of the potential energy is still
contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the
United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will
be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of
waste that needs treatment and disposal."

Reprocessing
produces waste that is intensely radioactive, toxic, thermally hot
and difficult to contain, counters Susan Gordon, director of the
Santa Fe, N.M.-based Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. And, she
says, costs keep rising; this year, DOE estimated cleanup costs at
$225 billion, $100 billion more than last year. Sites that were to
be completed by 2035 are now delayed to 2040 or even decades later,
she adds, and some sites where cleanup is in progress (including
Sandia and Los Alamos in New Mexico) are also gearing up to produce
a new generation of nuclear weapons.

"As a result,
cleanup becomes an ever more expensive, never-ending activity,"
says Gordon. "Despite years of trying to come up with a solution to
high-level waste, at huge cost to taxpayers, nothing has been
disposed of."

More from Energy & Industry

I need to correct a mistake in
this article -- there are no "failing tanks leaking
radioactive waste into the ground" at the Idaho National
Laboratory. In fact, of the 11 underground tanks used to
store high-level waste left over from reprocessing activities at
the DOE's Idaho Site, none has ever leaked.
(There has been leakage from a transfer line to the tanks, which is
being addressed under DOE's clean up program.)
DOE and our contractors have cleaned, grouted and closed 7 of the
11 300,000-gallon high-level waste tanks at Idaho, and are
constructing a treatment facility to process and empty the waste
from the other four tanks over the next several years.
Those tanks will also then be grouted and successfully
closed.

For more information on the cleanup status of DOE's Idaho
site, go to:

Idahocleanupproject.com

For more on the breakthroughs in
research in the nuclear industry, see: